By all available metrics,
student intellectual performance has declined precipitously as the university
administration has ballooned…the takeaway numbers regarding the university’s
role in the decline are shocking: 45 percent of students “did not demonstrate
any significant improvement in learning” during the first two years of college…

While the above is
certainly correct, and I’ve already noted college graduate IQ
is in freefall right now, to the point that it’s reasonable to
consider today’s college graduates of below average intelligence. The author
fails to identify why this is the case. Again I emphasize the twin issues of
corrupted (by administration) accreditation and fraudulent student loans.

Back when
accreditation was legitimate, accredited schools were forced to have
“respectable entrance requirements.” Honest, if universities restricted
admissions to only students who displayed some interest in education, the
author would not be able to blame the students for what’s happening in higher education
today.

The student loan
scam provides money to anyone who wants to set foot on campus, and that
includes people who have no interest in learning anything. And…this is where
admin come in. They took over accreditation so that “restricted admissions” was
removed, and campuses flooded with students (and those sweet student loan
checks!).

Then admin told
faculty to keep on passing even the fake students, instead of flunking them off
campus after one semester. And so faculty no longer asked students to read, to
write, to learn anything at all which couldn’t be picked up in a few minutes’
effort at most. We now have social
promotion in college because it’s so important to keep those student
loan checks flowing.

The author goes
into more detail why students are a problem, but…no. Administration, through
corrupted accreditation and the broken student loan system, are far more a
problem than the students, and the many fake students on campus today will
vanish overnight if we remove student loans so they’d have nothing to gain by
coming to campus, or alternatively (by some miracle) make accreditation force
entrance requirements on schools.

Where is
all the money going? In 1970 in the United States, 268,952 administrators and
staffers supported the work of 446,830 full-time professors. Today, the
proportions have almost flipped. Now we have 675,000 professors being
“supported” by 756,595 administrators and staffers. [16]

The above is
documented, but it should also be pointed out that we’ve tripled our student
base in that time, and tripled our administrators…while the number of
professors has increased only 50%. It’s actually worse than this, as many
administrative positions have been “reclassified” as faculty positions (for
example, the library staff), even if these supposed faculty teach nobody and
perform no research. The reason for doing so is it make the “student/faculty”
ratio look better. Supposedly, this ratio is around 17 on many campuses, even
if every classroom has at least 50 students and every faculty teaches at least
5 classes…it’s curious how no administrator understands how these numbers can’t
possibly be accurate, though I certainly forgive the author for not realizing
this part of the fraud of higher education (so many frauds to follow, after
all).

One
exception to this grim story is how elites educate their own children. The
Waldorf School of the Peninsula, which teaches the kids of many who work for Silicon
Valley giants like Google, Apple, Yahoo, and Hewlett-Packard, doesn’t allow
computers or cell phones or iPads in its K-12 classrooms. There it is all about
real human contact, free conversation, and tactile, intellectual, and emotional
engagement. [20] And when it comes to elite
universities, things are similarly oriented. The children of the wealthy and
powerful are not reading half-page op-eds for their weekly course content and
then pressing a clicker to indicate whether they like it or not

While the above
isn’t directly related to the rest of the article here, I include it because
it’s really, really, important for the gentle reader to know. The education
commoners get is nothing like the education the elite get—John Taylor Gatto discusses this in detail (I
strongly encourage the gentle reader to consider what this multiple
teacher-of-the-year winner has to say, and to read his other works as well).

Similarly, the
elite don’t send their kids to the mostly bogus higher education system the
commoners go to. In particular, their kids don’t go to community college, hence
why the frauds there are generally so huge.

The author
returns to discussing the problems of our current higher education system.

The
University Curriculum

…one
cause of the decline is “lack of rigor.” Students can’t do things they used to
be able to do for the simple reason that we no longer insist that they do them.
And why is that? …If students cannot think, read, or write any longer, it’s
because administrators don’t care if they can or can’t.

The above is certainly correct, and again
highlights the failure of accreditation, which is supposed to certify the
legitimacy of the education at an institution. My first decade in higher
education, I believed my universities were systematically defrauding
accreditation. It was only when I went to an unaccredited school, and went
through all the forms necessary to get accreditation that I realized the truth:

You can’t defraud accreditation
regarding the education at a university. Accreditors DO NOT CARE about
education. I’ve gone line by line over how a school gets
accredited, at no
point is education relevant to the process. As UNC demonstrated, you can
literally run fraudulent courses for thousands of students, actively work to
cover up the fraud, destroy the careers and livelihood of any faculty who tried
to fix the fraud, maintain the fraud for a couple decades…and the accreditor does not care, and at no point will the
accreditor threaten to remove accreditation and the flow of those sweet, sweet,
student loan checks.

And so again I point out that if we fix
accreditation, or get rid of the student loan checks, this problem will likely
dramatically reduce in severity. The author discusses the problems in more
detail but I feel it’s better simply to identify how to start fixing the
problems.

The next issue identified is:

University Governance

…that
was how the university used to function. Administrators arose from the general
faculty, served their terms in office, and then returned to their home
departments.

As I’ve mentioned before, the university
used to be run by scholars, each taking over the many part-time administrative
positions for a while before fully returning to faculty. Please understand,
this made sense, as most administrative positions really aren’t necessary for 8
hours a day, particularly when classes aren’t in session.

Now our campuses are run by full-time
administrators, filling their time doing things no faculty could even guess.
I’m inclined to blame faculty for ceding the reins of power to the wandering
plunderers who run campuses today. The student loan scam poured so much money
on campus it seemed like a good idea at the time to just hire a full time Dean
or whatever to deal with issues, little realizing what non-scholars would do in
these positions…faculty gave loaded guns to these chimpanzees.

That’s my opinion based on direct
observation. The author offers a different reason for the appearance of the
plunderers:

Once the
mandate changed to supplying the economy not with “skilled” labor —
universities have always done that — but with a certain technically minded
human being, scholars were deemed not merely unqualified to execute the
mandate, but antithetical to it. And they were, stated in this way, which is
why they were removed from university governance and academic decision-making.

I disagree here. Who removed faculty from university governance? Obviously, faculty
did, at least initially, as they were the only ones who could do so. Who set
the new agenda for what higher education was supposed to be about, leading to
the mess we have today? The people faculty foolishly hired to replace them.

Oops.

Once we let them in, they used their power
to hire more of their kind, which in turn hired more. It’s been a very
destructive parasitic infestation:

A first
step in the process was to hire senior managers from outside the local
university so boards of governors could vet them for agreement with the new
corporate ethos. These managers were in turn empowered to duplicate themselves
within the institution through the appointment of like-minded colleagues and
staff. This cohort of the corporate-minded has grown at a rate such that it has
outpaced all other university appointments — in the United States a 240 percent
increase from 1985 to 2005 compared to a mere 50 percent for faculty. [34]

I see only the drastic solution of cutting
off the money paying for these guys: kill the student loan scam, and schools
will either quickly go bankrupt (and most will), or fire the vast bulk of their
useless administrative staff. I can’t fathom a guess at how many will take the
latter option. 1%? 5%? Not many. However, the bankrupted schools will create an
educational vacuum which allow new schools to be built from the ground up.

With luck, the new schools will adopt the
methods which allowed us to have the best system of universities in the world.
It sure won’t be pretty for the first few years after the student loans are
finally shut off, however.

Please understand, this drastic action is
both necessary, and inevitable:

Why do
calls for austerity and downsizing apply to everyone except these people? Isn’t the point of good administration that it’s
done efficiently and cheaply? In Canadian universities, part-time faculty now
do 60 percent to 70 percent of the teaching because full-time faculty have been
cut so dramatically. [35]

The parasitic administrative class has
grown so large that it’s destroying the host. Already, many schools cannot afford to have teachers because they
spend so much on endless ranks of administrators, who mostly spend their time
scrambling to find the cheapest teachers they can get…even as tuition climbs
and climbs and climbs.

…as
David Layzell, fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, said to the National Observer when asked about the administrative
culture at the University of Calgary: “‘I really don’t feel that I can talk
with you about this.’ He added: ‘Maybe that says more than us actually
talking’.” [39]

The culture of fear of higher education
really has what faculty as remain terrified. Again, I point at the money.
During Prohibition, mobsters controlled alcohol, because there was so much
money in doing so. Everyone still drank…but you were afraid to talk about it
openly.

However, once Prohibition ended…the fear
factor in getting a beer vanished overnight. And the mobsters no longer
controlled the alcohol.

In a similar vein, even though 80% of the
citizens of this country go to college in some form, there’s a culture of fear here due to higher education’s control by
the thugs running the institutions. Kill the student loan scam, and I very much
suspect that culture of fear will disappear quickly.